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So what happens when these tools for maximizing clicks and engagement creep into the political sphere?

This is a delicate question! If you concede that they work just as well for politics as for commerce, you’re inviting government oversight. If you claim they don’t work well at all, you’re telling advertisers they’re wasting their money.

The future lives and dies by the state of the archives. To look hard at this world and honestly, diligently articulate what happened and what it was like in the present is a sort of promise to the future, a new layer to the palimpsest of history that can become someone else’s foundation.

We’ve gone through the invention step. The infrastructure came out of DARPA and the World Wide Web itself came out of CERN.

We’ve gone through the hobbyist step. Everyone now knows what the internet is, and some of the amazing things it’s capable of.

We’ve gone through the commercialization step. Monopolies have emerged, refined, and scaled the internet.

But the question remains: can we break with the tragic history that has befallen all prior information empires? Can this time be different?

The first part of this article is a great history lesson in the style of Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. The second part is a great explanation of net neutrality, why it matters, and how we can fight for it.

If you do nothing, we will lose the war for the open internet. The greatest tool for communication and creativity in human history will fall into the hands of a few powerful corporations and governments.

A service for US citizens that suggest five phone calls they can make at any time—based on their location—to influence their representatives.

Calling is the most effective way to influence your representative. 5 Calls gives you contacts and scripts so calling is quick and easy. We use your location to give you your local representatives so your calls are more impactful.

A well-argued piece by Malcolm Gladwell on the relative pros and cons of weak-tie networks and strong-tie hierarchies ...although, as always, Gladwell relies on anecdotes more than data to make his point.